Sublime Text 3 – Vi Keybinding to Exit Insert Mode

While the “escape” key has been the usual norm to exit “insert mode” into “visual mode”, the original vi editor encouraged and heavily used the “ctrl+[” keybinding to exit visual mode. Why should we care? Because “ctrl+[” is a lot closer to the fingers and more ergonomic, while hitting the “escape” key moves the left hand out of the home row position. Of course we assume that you remapped your Caps key to ctrl also 🙂

Here is the entry for the Sublime Text keymap file to bind “ctrl+[” to “escape” into visual mode:

{ "keys": ["ctrl+["], "command": "exit_insert_mode" }

On a sidenote: I cannot think of anyone would need to use the Caps key on a computer keyboard. Context is everything, the Caps key was important in the typewriter days because how else can text be made bold or italic. Capitalizing text was often the norm and it did’t indicate shouting as it does now.

The original vi manual, rather the paper “An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi” by Bill Joy has a very useful and quality tutorial that I have not seen matched even by commercial modern Vim/Vi books. You can get the PDF from the freebsd.org vi docs section here.